Mr. Walter Hampson, of Normanton, writes in a lighter vein
in his Tykes Abrooad (1911); he is our Yorkshire Mark Twain, and his
narrative of the adventures of a little party of Yorkshiremen in Normandy
and Brittany is full of humour. Songs are scattered through the story,
and one of these, "Owd England," finds a place in this collection. The
Colne Valley and the country round Huddersfield has been somewhat slow in
responding to the call of the homely muse of dialect but Mr. E. A.
Lodge's little volume of verse and prose. entitled Odds an' Ends,
marks a successful beginning.
In our account of the history of dialect poetry in Yorkshire it will have
been noticed that the chief forms of verse to which local poets have had
recourse have been the song, personal or dramatic, the ballad, and the
dialogue. Among the most hopeful signs of the times has been the recent
extension of dialect to poems of a more sustained character. Within the
last twenty years two writers, associated with the far north and the far
south of the county respectively, have made the bold attempt to use
dialect in narrative poems of larger compass than the simple ballad.
These are Mr. Richard Blakeborough, the author of T' Hunt o' Yatton
Brigg (1896), and Mr. J. S. Fletcher, who, as recently as 1915, published
in the dialect of Osgoldcross his Leet Livvy.
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